BIFF Offscreen: Arena

Thursday October 5 - Sunday October 8 @ Silo City / Duende

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Arena, HDV, 1985|2001|2023, 15 minute loop

This Offscreen video installation features intermodulations; oscillator, floor, light, bell, print, piano, book, memory ... Electronic performative spaces, acts, the free play of signifiers. Open form. 1985 recordings, real time, digital experimental video, revisited in 2001 and then again in 2023. The recent iterations of this work are active and performative, in three channels. The vibrational content, in its spatial and temporal distribution, unleashes diverse perceptual and conceptual events including potential allegorical readings. Suggested are multi-temporal and evolving communication realities and their material histories.

The tone and atmosphere of the piece is a cycling of immediacy and urgency. The design work of David Jones and the building by Peer Bode during the early 1980's “Tuesday Afternoon Club” building project resulted in the real time digital video buffer system. The original performative recordings took place in Owego, New York along the Susquehanna river at the Experimental Television Center.

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About the Artist:

Video Artist, Peer Bode, in a career spanning over four decades, has created an extensive body of work that investigates electronic media events, active perception systems and culture. A graduate of Binghamton University’s Cinema Department, Bode studied with Larry Gottheim, Nicholas Ray, Ken Jacobs and Peter Kubelka, and later with Woody and Steina Vasulka, Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad and Hollis Frampton at SUNY Buffalo’s Media Study Program. Bode worked at the Experimental Television Center (ETC), which his lifelong mentor and friend Ralph Hocking established in Binghamton in 1969. At the ETC, Bode made his seminal early works while assisting and collaborating with the video artist and engineer David Jones, whose “Jones Frame Buffer” became a signature processor within Bode’s oeuvre. His work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the Whitney Biennial, the European Media Art Festival (Germany), Impakt Film and Video Art Festival (the Netherlands), Viper Festival (Switzerland), among many others. A key figure of the Owego and Alfred schools of video arts, Bode headed the Video Arts Program at the School of Art and Design, NYSCC at Alfred University, where he co-founded the Institute for Electronic Arts (IEA). Bode is Professor of Art, Emeritus at the School of Art and Design, NYSCC at Alfred University, Alfred, NY.

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Still from Arena courtesy of the artist.